This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apartheid. The paper suggests that the university's ...

This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex ...

This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the Eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures ...

This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like
as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history.
Rather than presupposing the text as a ...

This article draws
inspiration from Jauss's theorisation of the concepts of horizon, reception, and
construction. The problem we confront relates to the way we receive, interpret,
and apply texts without cognisance of ...

This paper deals with cognitive failures and historiographical blind spots in legal and historical representations of the colonised subject. It concerns an archival fragment from the seventeenth century - the suicide of a ...

This article focuses on the lecture-room debates which have been the central feature of the first-year history course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 1993. The UWC History Department takes the position ...

This article presents a polemical argument for a politics of digitisation that aims to politicise the archival disciplines while making sense of the conjuncture in which digitisation initiatives are mooted in Southern ...

In this article I argue that what enabled affiliation to the larger political project
against apartheid was precisely the production of a subject that was always,
and necessarily, threaded through a structure of racial ...